Critical Reviews on Latin American Research - CROLAR

Groll, Constantin

Atria, Jorge

Complete Edition CROLAR Vol. 6(1)

Gunsenheimer, Antje

Pasados vivos. Miradas jóvenes sobre la historia de Chiapas de Elisa Cárdenas Ayala (coor.)

Contreras Saiz, Monika

Cagua Martinez, Andrea

Pascuti, Leonardo Moreira

Complete Edition CROLAR Vol. 6(2)

Alba Villalever, Carlos Eduardo

Informe: Hacking Team malware para la vigilancia en América Latina de Gisela Pérez de Acha (2015)

Müller, Frank

Segura, Ramiro

Editorial CROLAR Vol. 5(2)

Neder, Ricardo

Tecnologia Social. Contribuições conceituais e metodológicas de Renato Dagnino (2014)

Queijo, Juan

La ciencia no puede ser sin pecado un adorno de Alberto Nieto (2015)

Girolimo, Ulises

I-Polis. Ciudades en la era de Internet de Susana Finquelievich (2016)

Altenhain, Claudio

Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 20
During the past decade or so, surveillance 
studies have established themselves as an 
autonomous branch of social research in 
Latin America. Given the fact that the field 
originated in Western Europe and North 
America (for a brief historical outline, cf. 
Lyon, Haggerty & Ball 2012), this is certainly 
a highly welcome development – not 
least since many Latin American societies 
display certain peculiarities which are 
likely to affect surveillance practices in one 
way or another. 
In view of factors such as the recent history 
of authoritarian regimes and notoriously 
violent police, stark social inequalities and 
the pervasive fear of street crime, high 
 levels of urbanization, or the often frail 
public infrastructure(s), carrying out 
surveillance studies in Latin America 
promises to yield outcomes which 
might change the field as a whole 
by problematizing some of its tacit 
underpinnings. 
De-centering entrenched accounts of 
state sovereignty, neoliberal governance, 
or the public-private divide are integral to 
its overdue provincialization, as urged by 
Murakami Wood (2009). For this reason, 
both pertinent research on Latin America 
as well as from a Latin American point 
of view might do a lot to advance this 
relatively new and fast-growing field of 
study. While the present article draws 
almost exclusively upon Brazilian authors, 
it is supposed to serve as a “directional 
reference” that might be extrapolated to 
other national contexts within the “Global 
South” and beyond.
Out of the four books, Fernanda Bruno’s 
Máquinas de ver, modos de ser is both the 
most general and the least empirical. The 
REVIEW ARTICLES
Localizing Surveillance: All Eyes on Latin America
Fernanda Bruno (2013): Máquinas de ver, modos de ser: vigilância, tecnologia e subjetividade, 
Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 190 p.
Fernanda Bruno, Marta Kanashiro & Rodrigo Firmino (ed.) (2010): Vigilância e visibilidade: 
espaço, tecnologia e identificação, Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 296 p.
Bruno Cardoso (2014): Todos os olhos: Videovigilâncias, voyeurismos e (re)produção  
imagética, Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ e FAPERJ, 321 p.
Lucas Melgaço (2010): Securização urbana: da psicoesfera do medo à tecnoesfera da  
segurança, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 274 p.
Claudio Altenhain
University of Kent
Vol. 5(2) (2016): Digitalizing Urban Latin America | 21
author traces the intricate relationship 
between visibility and subjectivity, 
particularly in our present age of 
pervasive, automated surveillance and all-
encompassing communication networks 
as the main facilitators of an ever-
increasing production and distribution 
of digital images. The book is based on 
a collection of essays that have already 
appeared in various journals; however, it 
also contains some vignettes taken from 
her blog1 so as to elucidate her train of 
thought.
The book’s scope is a truly comprehensive 
one, but Bruno still manages to deliver a 
nuanced argument far from commonplace. 
Her core argument is that we live in an 
era of “distributed surveillance” (Bruno 
2013: 17), drawing mostly on Deleuze’s 
comments about the “societies of control” 
(Deleuze 1992), as well as on insights about 
“distributed agency” (Latour 1993) and 
techno-social actor-networks, which can 
be derived from science and technology 
studies. In a nutshell, her main argument 
holds that late modernity has brought 
about a new topology of subjectivity – 
an eversion, as it were, of the bourgeois 
distinction between interiority and 
exteriority, the public and the private (as 
famously elaborated in Habermas 1989), 
after which the inherited difference of 
surface and depth has ceased to capture 
anything substantial.
Correspondingly, contemporary practices 
of surveillance would draw upon an 
actuarial paradigm of risk and pre-
1 Cf. http://dispositivodevisibilidade.blogspot.com/ . 
Last access on 09/13/2016.
emption which has to be understood 
as performative rather than ideological, 
productive rather than repressive. CCTV 
cameras, for instance, enforce a regime of 
visibilities in which “‘appearing normal’ is 
more decisive than ‘being normal’” (Bruno 
2013: 96) – a techno-spatially enacted 
reconfiguration of subjectivity, as it were. 
The numerical mode of governmentality 
described in the third chapter would, 
then, take this configuration a step 
further insofar as it dissolves its object 
into a huge pile of aggregated data; 
correlation and extrapolation would 
come to irrevocably supplant any notion 
of causality in governing individuals as 
well as populations and herald the advent 
of a thoroughly “post-theoretical” age 
(Anderson 2008). The author does not fail 
to mention the crucial role of the private 
sector in data mining for governmental 
purposes. Indeed, as if to prove her right, 
one of Brazil’s major cellphone providers 
recently announced that it will cede its 
data to the COR, Rio de Janeiro’s multi-
purpose surveillance center – as part of a 
public-private effort to make the city more 
“intelligent”.2
While Maquinas de ver, modos de ser is 
theoretically dense and well-written, it 
still treats surveillance as a somewhat 
“placeless” phenomenon – as becomes 
clear when consulting the bibliography, 
in which Latin American scholars 
2 Cf. “TIM disponibiliza big data a parceiros externos para 
desenvolvimento de soluções inteligentes”; http://
www.tim.com.br/sp/sobre-a-tim/sala-de-imprensa/
press-releases/institucional/tim-disponibiliza-big-
data-a-parceiros-externos-para-desenvolvimento-de-
solucoes-inteligentes. Last access on 09/13/2016.
Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 22
as it highlights a crucial, yet often ignored 
feature of surveillance practices – namely, 
that they frequently aim at disciplining 
and/or controlling a particular social 
group.
In a similar vein, Rafael Barreto de Castro 
and Rosa Maria Leite Ribeiro Pedro 
propose a “cartography” of the CCTV 
network implemented in Guarujá, a 
wealthy beach resort nearby São Paulo. 
However, while Botello’s contribution on 
Huixquilucan depicts the deployment 
of surveillance technology as a 
materialization of mostly pre-defined 
social interests, Castro and Pedro concede 
a broader margin of agency to the actor-
network itself, that is: they go at greater 
lengths to describe its growth as an 
emergent and non-linear process that 
generates its proper truth-effects along 
the way. It is from this perspective that the 
authors conceive the system’s “expansive” 
development not as an intrinsic quality, but 
as a dynamic that unfolds incrementally – 
and which, nonetheless, gains sufficient 
momentum to make future scenarios 
without this kind of virtually unconceivable 
infrastructure. In this context, the way the 
system is couched in terms of “efficiency” 
and “modernity” by both the police and 
civil society is particularly insightful.
 Meanwhile, in their article on identification 
and exclusion in Brazil, David Murakami 
Wood and Rodrigo Firmino draw attention 
to a frequently overlooked feature of 
contemporary surveillance practices: their 
ambiguous character between repression 
and inclusion. Accordingly, especially 
for socially marginalized Brazilians, 
represent an almost negligible minority. 
Vigilância e visibilidade: espaço, tecnologia 
e identificação is a more locally specific 
publication insofar as it is explicitly 
concerned with Latin American “cases” of 
surveillance and the regional peculiarities 
it may entail. 
Among the contributions most pertinent 
to our understanding of surveillance 
in digitalized urban spaces, one might 
mention Nelson Arteaga Botello’s 
article on the implementation of CCTV 
cameras in Huixquilucan, an affluent 
but socioeconomically divided suburb 
of Mexico City. Botello observes that 
surveillance practices always oscillate 
between a logic of protection and a logic 
of social control – and that it is crucial to 
carefully examine the discourses uttered to 
justify and legitimize it so as to determine 
how both aspects are balanced against 
each other. In the case of Huixquilucan, 
the author argues, administrative dividing 
lines – largely coinciding with existing 
patterns of socioeconomic segregation 
– came to delineate two classes of 
populations, one of which depicted as 
transient and deviant and, therefore, as 
threatening the municipality’s “proper” 
citizens. 
Botello shows how this questionable 
division was promoted by a coalition 
of local governmental officials, private 
security companies and neighborhood 
associations and, not least, how it was 
eventually “inscribed” into the surveillance 
scheme installed. In the given context, 
the article is especially insightful insofar 
Vol. 5(2) (2016): Digitalizing Urban Latin America | 23
anonymity would be a threat rather than 
a promise, that is, the horror of oblivion 
weighs heavier than potential fears of the 
surveillance state. The authors exemplify 
their argument by referring to the case of 
Bolsa Família, a landmark welfare scheme 
which links the will to identification to 
the broadening of social rights. Keeping 
this ambivalent connotation of (state) 
surveillance in mind – particularly in such 
“disjunctive” (Holston & Caldeira 1998) 
societies as Brazil – might add some 
nuance to better understand the seemingly 
uncritical acceptance of surveillance in 
various countries of the “Global South”.
In Todos os olhos, Bruno Cardoso presents 
his doctoral thesis about CCTV in Rio de 
Janeiro. The starting point of his inquiry is 
simple, yet elegant: the author proposes 
an ethnography of the (surveilling) gaze – 
of the practices and devices through which 
it is brought into being, of what it reveals 
and conceals, and of its embedding in 
regimes of regulation and moralization. 
His thesis’ centerpiece consists in a thick 
description of the working (and watching) 
routines in two monitoring centers, 
established in anticipation of the FIFA 
World Cup and operated by Rio’s military 
police. Rich in ethnographic detail, the 
work puts particular emphasis on the 
many unresolved issues that impede the 
system’s daily operations. It is often placed 
on the interface between the human and 
the non-human actors constituting the 
surveillance network: a significant share 
of the policemen did not bring along the 
technical skills necessary to perform 
even the simplest computer operations. 
Likewise, the “surveillance workers” 
entrusted with evaluating the camera’s 
images were mostly overcharged by the 
sheer amount of information they had to 
deal with. Besides, the reader learns that 
the “purely technical” infrastructure also 
did not work as smoothly as announced: 
with a major part of the surveillance 
network drawing upon radio 
communication, the heavy rainfalls 
common in Rio weaken the signal up to 
the point of disruption. 
A major thread running through the study 
is the phenomenological similarity (and, at 
times, indistinguishability) of surveillance 
and voyeurism. Cardoso’s second 
ethnographic site being the monitoring 
room in Copacabana, the proximity of 
the famous beach as a locus of lax morals 
and sexual transgression clearly has a 
structuring impact upon the policemen’s 
(they are indeed predominantly male in 
both settings) watching practices – a fact 
which becomes manifest in the jokes and 
anecdotes by means of which the staff 
seems to negotiate this kind of dilemma. 
This ambivalence is also taken up in the 
book’s last part dedicated to the “super-
abundant” online circuits along which 
surveillance imagery is distributed, thus 
satisfying and sustaining the desire for 
ever more “real” material – typically in the 
“genres” of sex and violence. However, 
the author also underlines how this kind 
of fetish generates a flourishing economy 
of simulacra in which the very distinction 
between “real” and “fake” images becomes 
increasingly contingent.
   
Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 24
As compared to the other publications 
discussed, Lucas Melgaço’s Securização 
urbana differs insofar as, being a 
geographical piece of work, it is mainly 
concerned with questions of spatiality 
or, rather, the production as well as 
productivity thereof. Consequently, 
practices of surveillance do not constitute 
the conceptual starting point; instead, 
they come in as an explanatory factor for 
the “securitization of (urban) territory” 
(Melgaço 2010: 66), which represents 
the main object of study. Besides the 
installation of CCTV cameras, Melgaço 
therefore also deals with the phenomena 
of “defensive” architecture (ibid.: 120) and 
the proliferation of gated communities. 
His case is the city of Campinas, a major 
town in upstate São Paulo. Despite being 
one of Brazil’s richest cities, Campinas is 
characterized by stark socio-economic 
contrasts and high rates of violence as well 
as organized crime. Consequently, the fear 
of being victimized is pervasive among the 
better-off parts of its population.
It is here, in the “psycho-sphere of fear” 
(ibid.: 105), that Melgaço starts his inquiry 
which later leads him towards the “techno-
sphere of security” (ibid.: 106) – the sphere 
of commodified protection against the 
lurking criminal threat. The concepts of 
“psycho-” and “techno-sphere” are derived 
from the work of Milton Santos, a Brazilian 
geographer advocating a dialectical 
concept of space as in-becoming rather 
than a static and a-historical “container” 
of social praxis. Melgaço is thus able to 
depict “securization” as a spatial dynamics 
which takes place both materially (by 
the deployment of security devices) and 
immaterially (by the proliferation of crime-
related fears). Santos’ œuvre also provides 
many of Melgaço’s other basic terms 
– which is gratifying insofar as Santos 
was committed to come up with proper 
theoretical categories made to specifically 
fit the formation of territory in Brazil and in 
the countries of the “Global South”, more 
generally (cf. in particular Santos 2004).
In the context of surveillance and 
digitalized urbanism, the most insightful 
chapter is certainly the one on the 
“informatization of the everyday”, 
according to which territory, crime, and 
security are all subject to increasing 
techno-spatial mediations. Drawing 
upon Santos’ notion of a “violence of 
information” (Melgaço 2010: 184), it 
indeed appeals to similar phenomena 
such as the imagetic circuits analyzed by 
Bruno Cardoso, albeit from a different 
theoretical starting point and much less in-
depth. Generally speaking, the conceptual 
toolbox provided by Milton Santos entails 
a stronger emphasis upon processes of 
globalization and totalization. Besides, 
men seems to stand firmly in the center 
of his reasoning, which includes a more 
categorical differentiation between the 
social and the non-social “matter” of 
surveillance technologies. This is clearly 
different in Bruno Cardoso’s thesis, where 
human and non-human actors interact 
more symmetrically and the notion of 
“alienation”, recurrent in Melgaço’s study, 
is absent for good reasons.
Vol. 5(2) (2016): Digitalizing Urban Latin America | 25
In short, the four publications discussed 
provide a broad – albeit far from 
exhaustive – idea of how surveillance 
studies could benefit from a more locally 
as well as culturally situated approach. 
More specifically, they might draw our 
attention towards the question of how the 
loci of surveillance emerge as provisional 
outcomes of complex techno-social 
mediations which are virtually impossible 
to apprehend in advance. Ideally, 
such an approach would abstain from 
“contextual” explanations (such as 
“culture” or “technology”) altogether. 
Virtually all of the publications discussed 
here grapple with this challenge in one way 
or another, which makes them a valuable 
reading for scholars of surveillance way 
beyond Latin America’s geographical 
borders. Meanwhile, a desideratum 
for future research might consist in 
constructing a more emphatically 
“indigenous” theoretical vocabulary, that 
is: “provincializing” not only the “typical” 
cases and underlying grand narratives 
of Euro-American surveillance studies, 
but also the conceptual foundations it 
draws upon – even if they skillfully hide 
their proper origin within Euro-modernity 
(Law & Lin 2015). In this sense, a call for 
a more self-confident “theory from the 
South” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2011) would 
particularly entail more emphatically Latin 
American scholarship on European cases 
– an uncomfortably scarce phenomenon 
at present.
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Comaroff, Jean & Comaroff, John L. (2011): 
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English

Localizing Surveillance: All eyes on Latin America

“Smart Cities for whom, for which Citizens?” Interview with Lucas Melgaço

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